vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 27 April 2014 - Saturday 3 May 2014]
[page 124]
Sunday 27 April 2014
One of my old problems is the relationship of action, energy and power. I think it arose in the context of trying to find a physical analogy to money. Is energy, action or ower the physical equivalent of money? Action = S, E = ds/dt, Power = d2S/dt2.
Monday 28 April 2014
Chapter 1: Universe divine
Chapter 2: Creative power [seen through the tendency of fixed points to follow Cantor's theorem].
The defining feature of God is creative power, and its opposite, the power to annihilate. We can say nothing about the mysterious and invisible divine unity, only we assume that it fulfills the requirements of non-constructive fixed point theory and that the fixed points in the divine dynamics map be put into correspondence with the observables of quantum mechanics. The invisibility theorem is the denial of observability and so tells us that an observation requires one write to a particular memory location by the transmitter and one
read of the same memory by the receiver.
Tuesday 29 April 2014
From my perspective the rate of communication between the Father and the Son (represented by the Holy Boson) is the energy of the Universe. Things seems to be falling strangely into place and Sol Invictus is a project carrying my obsession with the divine Universe forward at something that feels like the historical rate. It is a measure of the distance to be covered that this has been going on in my mind for forty years and I still feel that I have a long way to go (and hope that I have the life ahead of me to do it).
Wednesday 30 April 2014
Feynman I, 7-7: 'What is gravity? . . . No one has [since Newton] given any machinery. It is characteristic of physical laws that they have an abstract character . . . Why can we use mathematics to describe nature without a mechanism behind it? No one knows.'
Thursday 1 May 2014
Another letter to Pope Francis posted today. See below. A very quixotic operation because the Catholic Church is a very big windmill. But like the Don, deluded as I may be, I think it must be done. My position is very unsafe, taking on the Church and the scientific establishment at the same time since there are not inclined to take too kindly to the claim that theology can be a real science and that the Universe is divine.
Wednesday 30 April 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
This is my seventh letter to you, without reply. As I have told you before, I will keep writing to you until you reply, because I know that you will reply when you finally realize the irrefutable truth of what I am trying to tell you.
I am sure that by now I have left you in no doubt that I consider the Roman Catholic Church to be a point on what George W. Bush would call the axis of evil. This might be an unpopular opinion, particularly within the Church, but it has a certain foundation. I have already spoken of the Church’s attempts to cover up the widespread abuse of children for which it has been responsible. I believe that your apology for these crimes reported by the Associated Press this month are heartfelt, but such a personal apology does little to deal with the underlying evil the infects the Church.
I have previously written that I see the central problem with the Church as essentially the same as Catholic tradition attributes to Lucifer or Satan, that is pride. This tendency in the Church reached its apogee in the nineteenth century when the First Vatican Council decreed that the Pope speaking ex cathedra is infallible. This error has blinded the Church to reality and lies at the root of the belief, clearly manifest in the matter of child sexual abuse, that the Church as an institution has considered itself above any human or natural law. Until this position is clearly, officially and effectively repudiated, the Church remains an enemy of humanity.
The Church must repent, that is, literally think again. Its ancient monarchical, authoritarian anti democratic, anti scientific model is no longer tolerable two thousand years after the Church was established
You may consider this assertion as the words if a dissatisfied member of the Church to be lightly dismissed. Naturally I think you are wrong, and your lack of response to my request for a hearing tends to confirm my belief that the Church will continue in its evil ways until it is faced with overwhelming force and particularly strong financial retribution and a global loss of credibility. This may take a long time but I believe that it is inevitable.
To begin to give more scientific substance to my accusation, I can do no better than quote the words of Galileo:
sì perché l'autorità dell'opinione di mille nelle scienze non val per una scintilla di ragione di un solo, sì perché le presenti osservazioni spogliano d'autorità i decreti de' passati scrittori, i quali se vedute l'avessero, avrebbono diversamente determinato.My argument is essentially a cybernetic exposition of the old aphorism power corrupts which I foreshadowed at the end of my last letter. We begin, as ever, with Aristotle and Aquinas' assertion, clearly accepted by the Church, that God is actus purus.
Aquinas, following Aristotle, draws number of apparently contradictory conclusions from this proposition. Here I concentrate on two: God is both eternal and alive.
Aquinas first proof for the existence of God is built around the Aristotelian axiom that no potential (potentia, dunamis) can bring itself to actuality (actus, entelecheia). On the assumption that motion is a passage from potential to actual, Aristotle and Aquinas conclude that nothing can move itself. Since the world manifestly moves, they are led to postulate a first unmoved mover which Aquinas equates to God. It follows easily that God is pure actuality with no potential. In other words, God is all that an possibly exist.
The difficulty arises when we come to the life of God. Aristotle defines life as self motion and Aquinas accepts this definition, although it appears to contradict the conclusion that nothing can move itself. In the case of God, Aquinas proposes a new type of motion, proper to God, from act to act.
I have already noted in a previous letter that this is one of the entry points to my hypothesis that God and the Universe are identical. Since a time shortly after Newton, it has been a commonplace of physics that actual and potential energy are equally energy and the passage from potential to actual and actual to potential are equally possible. The simplest example of this is the classical harmonic oscillator, an ideal pendulum for instance. This suggests that the Aristotelian axiom mentioned above is wrong. Instead, in Aristotelian terms, all motion in the Universe is motivated by potential, that is motion from act to act.
The Church doctrine of infallibility tacitly emphasizes the immutability and eternity of God, since, as Parmenides noted 2500 years ago, one cannot make permanently true statements about a changing entity. In reality, truth has a dynamic aspect, as the world changes, our statements about the world must also also change. So the sentence Joseph Ratzinger is Pope while once true but is no longer so. Similarly, things that might have been seen to be true two thousand years ago when the authors of the Church first wrote the New Testament need no longer be true of a dynamic God.
Galileo faced a similar problem. For a long time the heavenly bodies were thought be composed of some fifth element and to be perfect. When his telescopes revealed that the sun had spots and the moon mountains, many without the courage to face reality refused to look through his telescopes lest they be forced by the evidence of their own eyes t0 realize that this ancient belief was wrong.
The Second Vatican Council clearly recognized that the Church must change with the changing times, but while it fiddled with minor details of language and emphasis, it avoided dealing with the substantive issues which must be faced if the Church is to bring itself into line with reality by recognizing that the truth about a dynamic living God must itself be dynamic and living.
Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine, Like many scientific advances, it was motivated partly by military necessity: how do we hit a moving aeroplane with a moving shell, particularly when the velocity of the plane is a significant fraction of the velocity of the shell? This requires observation of the plane and a prediction of its future position at the time when the shell arrives at that position. This problem is identical to the problem faced by tennis planer, for instance, who must predict and occupy a position from which she can return an incoming shot from her opponent.
Following this analogy, we see the Church as standing immobile in the middle of the court demanding that opponents hit the ball straight to it if they want to play the game. It seems certain, for instance, that employes of the Church have been responsible child sexual abuse for a long time while the Church has stood in a state of denial refusing to see what is happening and to react appropriately.
Although ecclesiastical child sexual abuse is abhorrent and will hopefully be eradicated either by the Church itself or by secular law enforcement authorities in the next few decades, there remain many matters of science and governance where the Church apparently feels no need conform to changing views of the world and humanity
The most important of these, and the central theme of my letters to you, is the Church's radical denial that it is a human institution which must make and accept a scientific study of the world if it is to guide itself responsibility. At present the Church takes the view that God revealed itself once for all through the Bible, and that it needs no further guidance to determine its course through the world. This approach is very similar to that of a driver, who once having taken a look outside the vehicle continues to drive in traffic with his eyes shut, an approach almost guaranteed to end in disaster. In the event of the almost certain consequent accident, such a driver would normally be found guilty of culpable negligence. It is fundamental requirement for successful control that the controller receives information from its environment at a sufficient rate to determine its action precisely and that it can react fast enough to respond to the inputs from its environment. The essence of ball games like tennis is on the one hand to deceive one's opponent about where the ball is going to go, and on the other to place it in such a way that the opponent cannot control it.
The technical condition for perfect control is called requisite variety. In dynamic systems, variety is measured by bandwidth, that is the time rate of transfer of information. The controller must have sufficient bandwidth to measure every move of the controlled system and command action to deal with it. There are two complementary ways to achieve this. One is to increase the bandwidth of the controller. The other is to reduce the bandwidth of the controlled system.
We may see this in operation in a school room. At first glance, one teacher has no chance of controlling 30 lively children. The key to success is to reduce the variety of the children. The traditional approach is to get them all to sit still at their individual desks, forbid them to talk to one another, pick off and punish the troublemakers and so on. More enlightened teachers may achieve a similar result by giving interesting lessons, showing the children how to cooperate in their own learning, counselling rather than punishing those that find classroom life unbearable, and so on. This second approach is equivalent to increasing the bandwidth of the teacher, approaching the task in innovative ways while minimizing the variety reducing constraints on the children. Such a teacher still maintains control, but in a manner which respects the liveliness of the children.
All organisms, from individuals to nations, are moving through the universal environment and depend for survival on avoiding sudden death, and on obtaining the resources for growth and reproduction. The Church is no exception and has done very well to live for two thousand years and increase its membership from approximately twelve to about one billion. Its size and power, however, is no reason for complacency.
The Church grew up in the Roman world where death or severe punishment was used by the ruling elite to maintain control. Rome was basically a military dictatorship which survived through much of its history by plundering its neighbours. One might guess that in this context Christianity was a beneficial influence, but as its power grew it gradually became politically active and turned to suppressing unbelievers by murder just like its Roman political mentors. The Church has continued to rule by variety reduction ever since.
In its early days the Church existed in a world that was changing very slowly and was greatly assisted by the fact that it was the source of much of the innovation in the human world. In the middle ages, the Church became politically proactive and began to employ military power to execute its policies. The Crusades are the most conspicuous example of this behaviour.
The entrenched power of the Church began to be challenged during the Reformation and the Renaissance. In general the Church reacted simply by reasserting its authority and withdrawing further from evolving realities. This withdrawal from the world culminated, as I have mentioned, in the definition of Papal infallibility.
This attitude is premissed on the claim that traditional Christian theology is superior to our modern scientific understanding of the world. The Church's explicit theological beliefs rarely fit experience. At the core of this dissonance is the idea that God was in some way pleased by successfully arranging to have his Son cruelly murdered to make amends for some imagined original sin.
There is no way that any person with modern sensibilities can accept that such a scenario has any relevance to human life. Admittedly there are many killers and torturers in the world. One of the principal advocates of this sort of behaviour is the supposedly Christian United States. All the evidence suggests that the US adventures in murder and torture have been completely counterproductive. Insofar as the Catholic 'history of salvation' tends to emphasize the salvific role of pain, torture and murder, the Church should repudiate it. It is just another form of variety reduction, contrary to the creative power of the divine Universe to increase variety.
The early years of my life were blighted by the Church's attempts at variety reduction, I was born a horny, intelligent and energetic child into a world of belief that contradicted everything that I could see for myself. I was taught that I am a damaged and defective amalgam of animal and spiritual being. I was taught that the flesh is the murdering enemy of the spirit and must be suppressed to meet the demands of unseen authority.
As I see it now, the assault on me was directed at all those creative energies that have their fulfillment in normal life. When, in desperation, I decided to throw my whole life into satisfying the Church, I was required to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, thereby reducing myself to the shadow of a human being, a drone in the service of the Church.
I renounced, formally and permanently all identification with things, like land. I renounced all identification with my own drive to reproduce myself. I renounced all identification with my own mind and will. We are to a large degree what we are taught. The contradiction in my religion became a contradiction in me, although it took me a long time to discover that. I pursued wholeness and understanding with all my energy, but it was not there to be found.
When I did know enough to start rethinking the religion that was destroying me, it found me guilty of dangerous ideas and expelled me. I left with an overwhelming sense of shame and failure. I was torn in two because I had attempted to bridge the gap between a religion that denied the existence of the world and a world whose existence I could not deny.
As I have pointed out to you, these days are over now. My nightmares of being back in the monastery have ceased. I have cured myself by escaping from the ancient and repressive power of the Church and have found a God that is part of me and I part of it.
The defining feature of God is creative power. The first words in the Christian history are to be found in the Book of Genesis: In the beginning, god created the heavens and the Earth. Implicit in this sentence is the idea that God existed before the Universe, and that the design of the Universe pre-existed in the mind of God as a house might pre-exist in the mind of its architect and builder.
Given the hypothesis that the Universe is itself divine, to say God created the Universe is tantamount to God to saying that God creates itself. How are we to explain this? The Christians answer is simple: God is an uncreated eternal being with no beginning and no end. The Universe, on the other hand, appears to have had a beginning and some writers believe that it may have an end.
We can no more explain why God exists than why the Universe exists. We are here and that is that. But there is a lot more that can be said about a divine Universe than we can say about an invisible God, so that theology, instead of relying on the works of ancient and scientifically illiterate writers can become a real science, based on our common public and private human experience. One of the most obvious things about the Universe is that it is creative. One way that the Church blinds itself to reality is by denying its employees the right to reproduce, thus effectively hiding from their view the amazing process of creating new human beings.
Popper characterized science as conjecture and refutation. Conjectures are fictions, ideas dreamt up to explain the observed phenomena. Refutations are critical evaluations of these ideas which attempt to find inconsistencies both in the ideas themselves and the relationships between the ideas and observable reality.
Galileo drew our attention to the idea that if we want to read the truth, a good place to start is the book of nature. He also told us that the language of the book of nature is mathematics. In his day mathematics was principally geometry and arithmetic, both very useful both in everyday matters like trade and construction, and applicable also to the study of the heavens.
The first big success of Galileo's program was Newtonian mechanics. Newton's work stood on two legs. One was the astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe and others from which Johannes Kepler, studying the orbit of Mars, derived his three laws of planetary motion. The other was Newton's own mathematical developments, including the invention of calculus, which ultimately led to his formulation of the dynamics of the heavens and the Earth. By his work, Newton put the heavens and the Earth on the same level.
Since Newton's day, there has been an enormous expansion in the library of mathematical fictions available to model the world. The study of continuity motivated by Newton's invention of calculus led to Cantor's development of the transfinite numbers. The transfinite numbers led to Hilbert's function theory which is the foundation of quantum mechanics. The transfinite numbers also lie at the foundation of Goedel's incompleteness theorems and Turing's discovery that there are incomputable functions. These ideas fed back into quantum information theory and made the ancient distinction between matter and spirit unnecessary. Matter as we now know it is not inert and dead, but pure activity, that is divine.
All these ideas add immensely to theology, but appear to be completely ignored by the Church. As I have pointed out before, the Pontificial Academy of Science appears to have nothing to say about physics, information theory, modern logic or in fact any ideas that have developed since the nineteen century. The Church is flying blind, and I think this is disgraceful.
The Church might like to argue that these things are outside its remit. On the other hand, the Church claims to be the custodian of theology, the traditional theory of everything. It must therefore take note of everything and respond to it. If we are to trust the Church to navigate us through the difficult waters of life, we must at least be assured that the Captain is plotting a course in full knowledge of what is going on around the ship, not sitting back saying we've been here before. We know it all. There is nothing new here. A mysterious higher power guarantees that I am infallible and can do no wrong.
Famous last words?
Yours sincerely, . . .
copies:
President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
The Editor, L'Osservatore Romano
The Editor, National Catholic Reporter,
The Editor, The Tablet,
[page 126]
However, I have arranged my affairs so that I can keep this work up for a long time and there is a chance that it will pay off in the end, so I keep at it, led on by a few little insights every day. Today we are thinking about Boltzmann's complexions and the way that they, like the transfinite numbers, are generated by permutation. Time to have another look at 'unreasonable effectiveness' and see if I can complete it yet. If so will include it in the website after the letter to Francis tomorrow.
Friday 2 May 2014
The fact that Boltzmann counting works for perfect gases tells us that space-time addressing is relevant for identical prticles, and suggests that bosons and possibly fermions predate space in some way, bosons maybe exist in 1D (time/frequency) space and fermions in 2D (time, 1D of space).
Saturday 3 May 2014
Eureka Street: It's Time to See the Real God. It is nearly fifty years since I was thrown out of the Dominican Order in Australia for propagating heresy. My heresy was (and is) that the Catholic God is a fiction developed for political purposes. The whole raison d'etre of the Church revolves around its claim to be the sole and exclusive channel of communication with this God. The contrary position is that the Universe as we know it provides all the services and explanations that the Church attributes to its God, and so is fittingly called divine. Where the Universe came from like where the Catholic God came from remains a mystery, but we cannot deny that we are here, and the
scientific narrative about the four billion years of creation it has taken to create us is much more satisfying and evidence based than anything the Church has to say, which comprises mainly taking refuge in mystery [secrecy].
Apart from being sat on a few nuns' knees and systematically beaten by brothers and priests, I was not physically molested by the Church but my mind was severely twisted by trying to believe in things like original sin and the unreality of death. I spent some of my time waging war on these silly ideas but now I feel that I can retire from this work and leave the Church to self destruct as its past sins are revealed by the secular authorities. In fifty years or so when the child sexual abuse story is fully played out around the world I can imagine that attention will turn to the ethical evils of the false doctrines propagated by the Church which have served to convince it that it is above the law and perfectly entitled to avoid retribution for the damage it has done to the bodies and minds of billions of children over the last two thousand years.
My first twenty years after leaving the Order were hell but then I settled into the belief that the Universe is divine and have worked it out in considerable detail with the help of Thomas Aquinas, Richard Feynman and others, The time now has come to start preaching a real God. The pope claims to be Christ's Vicar on Earth, I claim that the Sun is the divine Universe's vicar in our local neighbourhood, an well worth worshipping a a God. It is, after all, completely responsible for all our physical and spiritual reality.
To understand the role of the Sun we have no alternative but to become immersed in quantum statistical mechanics.
[page 128]
Many things are coming to a head at once, eg child sexual abuse, political, social and economic inequality, and the role of corporations in the abuse of individuals. We have to ask ourselves how something as simple as solar radiation acting on an elemental planet can give us the beautiful and complex environment that we enjoy.
Christianity subsidizes many pervers ideas: that we are inherently evil, that wealth correlates positively with virtue, that the world was made just for us, that women and 'women's work' are inferior and that death is not real, that institutions are more important than individuals, that martyrdom is virtuous, that poverty, chastity and obedience are good.
The study and elaboration of Christianity attracted the cream of intellectual talent in the mediterranean area and so we find many brilliant ideas incorporated into Christianity which become clearer when we strip all the political claims of world religious domination reflected in the speech made to Peter recorded in Mt 16:18 sqq and parallel locations.
The Christian God is a creature of fiction [ie a fictitious creature].
Now that I am looking back on life from very close to my three score and ten I see that almost all the processes of government that impinged upon me from Church and State were scams, that is baseless fictions that nevertheless served as a temporary foundation for social life until perhaps a better one came along. This idea first came to me in the recognition that the Catholic God is false. This insight occurred to me in a monastery and I was young and idealistic enough to talk about it to my teachers
[page 129]
and even to publish and promote it. Sure enough, they threw me out, but I still feels that I am on the right track. The Catholic belief that their picture of God is true is built on three foundations. One is miracles, which are taken as evidence that a sainted person has interceded with God to abrogate the laws of nature in a particular instance. From a scientific point of view, miracles have no probative value because they are not s publicly observable and repeatable phenomenon that can be carefully observed in many instances like the act of human reproduction, The second foundation is the scriptures. These too prove nothing. From a scientific point of view the Bible is in effect a set of hypotheses which are not testable. Did Jesus of Nazareth really perform miracles? We will never know, we can believe it or not. The Christian New testament was written well after Jesus of Nazareth died, and one can see that it draws heavily on the Hebrew Bibe and other writings in circulation at the time. Finally we have proofs for the existence of God. I had read Aquinas and then I read Lonergan who cast Aquinas' ideas in a new light. Lonergan casts his argument along Aquinas' lines, saying that every proof of God was an example of the fact that the Universe is not fully intelligible, and we expect God, the transcendent being to be fully intelligible. Lonergan argues that the world is not fully intelligible because it contains meaningless data, which he called the empirical residue, unexplainable (ie unintelligible) facts. He gave as examples some of the symmetries of classical physics, that position in space has no meaning, for instance. In the course of a year I began to see that Lonergan's proof failed, leaving no reason to hypothesize a distinction between God and the world. In the years that followed I have reread Lonergan a few times and think I can put my finger firmly on his error, the confusion of abstract representations of reality with reality itself. Lonergan's empirical residue is a feature of spacetime symmetries, but not
[page 130]
[of] observable reality itself which is all broken symmetries, that is a set of observable events. All of these events are unique like actual human beings. We can overlook this uniqueness for various purposes like framing declarations of human rights, which are realized in every instance of a human being in a way peculiar to the course of their life in their environment. The observable Universe, therefore, is pure action, just like God is pure action and every event in the Universe has a history that gives it meaning and exercises some control over future events stemming from the events of interest. Science is only equipped to select and study the recurrent features of unique events. To study childbirth, for instance, we must collect our data by observing actual instances of childbirth. The Catholic Church works in the opposite direction to science. Instead of observing human life and drawing conclusions from what it sees, the Church imposes doctrines from above. It does this because its whole culture is based on the monarchical idea of top down control. And off we go into requisite variety and the impossibility of control by the elite without reducing the variety of the masses. The Church, in other words, is a scam, an elitist organization that peddles castles in the air as if they were real estate. The only salvation for this Church is to move to an evidence based theology based on the observed realities of human nature and the human condition. The Church resists this, of course, claiming that it has the gift of infallible truth. This is a pure con, The only answer is to design our society so that no elite can take control. How? Science and democracy, ie collective decision making built on the true facts of every situation. . . .
[page 131]
. . .
All this is something like a ferilized egg, a blueprint that has had the final inhibitions to reproduction removed.
Feynman I 39 The Kinetic Theory of Gases. Force - d(momentum) / dt
Equality: Human equality from a thermodynamic point of view means that we are all at pretty much the same temperature which comes about if we are in free communication with one another - no elite secrecy (?).
The movie people, like the ruling elite, (eg NSW Liberal Party, Secret Police) go to an enormous amount of trouble to fake things up to deceive the watchers.
